Greater Toronto Area Becomes High-Tech Hub

The Greater Toronto Area (GTA) in Ontario is steadily becoming a key Canadian high-tech hub which is growing in importance as Canada seeks to diversify its economy.

For many years, the Canadian economy has placed a strong emphasis on its abundant natural resources, such as oil, natural gas, timber and metals. This has produced great wealth for Canada in general, and benefitted the western Canadian provinces and territories in particular.

A recent drop in global oil prices, however, has demonstrated the need for Canada not to “place all its eggs in one basket” in terms of relying so heavily on prosperity produced from oil and other natural resources.

Thus, the balance of economic power in Canada is starting to shift away from a heavy reliance on oil extracted from western provinces such as Alberta and Saskatchewan and move more toward boosting other sectors of the Canadian economy, such as high-technology which continues to flourish.

Over the past several years, Canada’s high-tech industry has been concentrating in Toronto and neighboring cities in Ontario. In fact, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) is considered to be a top high-tech hub, right along with California’s Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle and Washington, DC, in the United States.

In January 2016, Google opened its new engineering headquarters in the Toronto suburb of Kitchener, while Cisco Systems recently opened its new Innovation Centre in downtown Toronto. Blackberry also has its headquarters in the GTA, plus there are hundreds of high-tech startup companies centered around Toronto.

The high-tech firms of the Toronto area are helping to create many good-paying jobs in Canada. For example, construction workers have found employment opportunities building these new high-tech centers (e.g., for Google and Cisco Systems in Ontario), plus IT professionals (e.g., software developers, engineers, etc.) and other skilled workers (e.g., human resource, finance, marketing, management, etc.), have been hired to work at these technology companies after their new facilities have been built.

Now is a good time for skilled foreign workers in the high-tech industry to seek jobs in Canada due to an ongoing labor shortage in the country which has also helped salaries to soar. While the largest number of tech jobs in Canada are found in the Toronto area, Quebec and British Columbia are also key hubs of the Canadian high-tech scene with great employment opportunities. Many additional occupations in the medical, financial, education, construction and other sectors of Canada’s economy are in high-demand and qualify for various Canadian immigration programs. If you would like to live and work in Canada and want to learn more about applying for a Canadian visa, click here!